The Verge

Ads may be coming to Ted Lasso. | Image: Apple Apple has made a notable hire that could signal its intent to move into ads on Apple TV Plus. The company has hired advertising exec Lauren Fry to “to help build a video advertising business for its Apple TV Plus streaming service,” according to The Information.Apple has been turning more to ads to help grow its revenues; it added new ad placements in the App Store last year and reportedly wants to bring ads to apps like Maps, Books, and Podcasts, so it’s not surprising that it’s looking at ads for TV Plus as well. And this hire isn’t even the first exploration of ads with its streaming offerings, as it has run ads against its Major League Baseball games and is reportedly building an ad network around its streaming service with Major... Continue reading…

A bear roaring into a cloud of cocaine. | Image: Universal Director Elizabeth Banks’ Cocaine Bear over-delivers on a very simple, silly premise that mostly works because it doesn’t take anything seriously except being ridiculous. Continue reading…

A liftboat off the beach near Wainscott, New York, on December 1st, 2022. The vessel’s drill will be used in the construction of a wind farm. | Image: Johnny Milano/Bloomberg via Getty Images The largest national organization of American Indian and Alaska Native tribal governments is calling on the Biden administration to pause offshore wind projects. They want to ensure that tribes are included in project planning and that there are measures in place to protect their territories and traditional resources.In a resolution adopted this week, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) “strongly urges the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to halt all scoping and permitting for offshore wind projects until completion of a comprehensive and transparent procedure adequately protecting tribal environmental and sovereign interests is developed and implemented.” It was adopted during a meeting... Continue reading…

Motorola Defy Satellite Link accessory by Bullitt. | Image: Bullitt Bullitt, the company that brought you rugged Cat-branded smartphones with thermal cameras, is stuffing trendy emergency-response satellite tech into a Motorola-branded Bluetooth keychain accessory.Making its debut at MWC 2023, the new Motorola Defy Satellite Link can enable almost any smartphone to send and receive text messages in places lacking cellular signals. Satellite communications features are being mainstreamed after Apple added Emergency SOS via satellite in the iPhone 14 and Apple Watch Ultra. Qualcomm is also looking to stick similar tech into upcoming high-end Android devices later this year, but Bullitt and MediaTek say their devices will be the first ones you can buy that communicate in both directions.Outdoorsy users... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Nintendo has confirmed to The Verge that it will not be attending E3 2023.“We approach our involvement in any event on a case-by-case basis and are always considering various ways to engage with our fans,” the company said in a statement. “Since this year’s E3 show didn’t fit into our plans, we have made the decision to not participate. However, we have been and continue to be a strong supporter of the ESA and E3.”Nintendo’s participation had been in doubt since IGN reported that it, Sony, and Microsoft would all be skipping E3, and now we know for certain that Nintendo won’t be at the show. E3 is set to take place in-person from June 13th through 16th in Los Angeles, which is just over a month after the release of The Legend of Zelda:... Continue reading…

Photo by George Rose / Getty Images Controversial solar geoengineering startup Make Sunsets says it released three balloons carrying atmosphere-altering particles in Reno, Nevada, this month. It’s an escalation of the company’s questionable climate change-fighting tactics, which got it banned from launching balloons in Mexico in January. And while the company says it got the green light from the FAA and local authorities, officials say no such authorization was granted.The way Make Sunsets explains it, this kind of geoengineering is a solution to humanity’s epic failure to stop planet-heating pollution. But experts say Make Sunsets has jumped the gun with its experiments — even those who are optimistic about solar geoengineering. There are still way too many questions... Continue reading…

Brightly colored earbuds in your ears may do a good job of subtly telling others not to bother you. | Image: Beats The colorful new variants of the Beats Fit Pro wireless earbuds just came out yesterday, and today, the yellow and pink models are already on sale. You can pick up a pair of “volt yellow” or “coral pink” Beats for $169.83 at Amazon, $30.12 off their regular $199.95 price. New products and colorways usually take a little longer than one day before they start seeing some discounts, but if you dig a tennis ball-like color for your electronics (the electric volt Xbox controller says hi!), then you’ve got yourself a nice deal here on something new and fresh.Not only are the Beats Fit Pro now brighter than ever but they’re also one of our favorite pairs of Bluetooth earbuds — especially for running and fitness. They sadly lack the convenience... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Plus LumaFusion comes to Android and ChromeOS, and PlayStation holds another trailer showcase. Continue reading…

Once the king of fitness trackers, Fitbit’s recent outages and a decision to shutter Challenges have left users disgruntled. | Illustration: The Verge These days, Fitbit users seem to be asking each other the same question: is it me, or is the app down for everybody else, too? Between frequent server outages and a recent decision to shutter popular social features, frustrated Fitbit customers say they’re weighing their options.Earlier this month, Google-owned Fitbit suffered a massive server outage that left users unable to sync trackers or view their data within the app or on Fitbit’s website. If it had been a one-off server outage, it’s likely users would’ve written it off as a fluke. But it extended into a second day and then a third. Then, around 1PM ET yesterday, over 1,600 users reported yet another outage, according to Downdetector. Others reported the outage to the @... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Google is running tests that block access to news for some Canadian users in response to a new bill that could force it and other large platforms like Meta’s Facebook to negotiate deals with news publishers to pay them for content, Reuters reports. The tests will reportedly impact less than four percent of Canadian users, run for around five weeks, and will “limit the visibility of Canadian and international news to varying degrees.”The tests come in response to Canada’s Online News Act, also known as “Bill C-18,” which is currently being considered by the Canadian Senate, according to The Globe and Mail.In a tweet, Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez said Canadians won’t be intimidated by Google’s behavior. “It’s... Continue reading…

After a year-long struggle, the boutique maker of stealthy electric bikes finally gets it right. Continue reading…

Image: Eli Ade Michael B. Jordan’s directorial debut feels like an experimental remake of Rocky V that finally lets Adonis Creed step outside of his mentor’s shadow. Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube has confirmed that it’s experimenting with a higher-quality 1080p option for Premium subscribers after some Reddit users noticed a new “1080p Premium” option in the quality settings menu. The option is currently available to “a small group of YouTube Premium subscribers,” according to Paul Pennington, a spokesperson for the company.“1080p Premium is an enhanced bitrate version of 1080p which provides more information per pixel that results in a higher quality viewing experience,” said Pennington, adding that “there are no changes to the existing quality offerings for 1080p (HD) resolution on YouTube.” There have been concerns that YouTube is nerfing the standard 1080p mode to make the Premium version more appealing, but the... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Binance.US’s proposed deal to purchase the assets from the collapsed cryptocurrency brokerage Voyager Digital is facing scrutiny from federal and state regulators, as reported earlier by CoinDesk. In a set of court filings submitted on Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and New York’s financial regulator expressed opposition to the $1 billion deal.Voyager Digital filed for bankruptcy last year after the now-defunct crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital defaulted on a $670 million loan provided by Voyager. Binance.US — the US version of the Binance trading platform — later announced its plans to purchase Voyager’s assets for $1 billion, stating at the time it could help free up some of the funds locked up in the... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav touted the success of the company’s turbulent megamerger during the company’s earnings call on Thursday, with repeated assurances that things are “working” — even though the company axed several shows and lost another $2.1 billion over the past few months, according to the company’s Q4 2022 earnings report. The combined company earned $11 billion in revenue this past quarter.“It’s working in an increasingly challenging environment,” Zalslav affirms. “It’s working on direct-to-consumer — we are making meaningful progress on our goal to achieve real profitability in streaming... It’s working, and our new studio heads are hard at work putting their unmatched creative stamp on our future slate.”HBO,... Continue reading…

Image: Enhance Humanity, the newest game from Tetris Effect publisher Enhance, has you play as a glowing Shiba Inu to direct crowds of marching humans through Lemmings-like puzzles. Yes, it sounds strange, but you’ll be able to get your hands on it starting Thursday, so at least you can pass judgment on it for yourself.I’d recommend watching the trailer first, though. As the dog, it seems you’ll help direct the faceless humans across all sorts of environments, obstacles, and opposing humans to lead them to safety. The game’s campaign mode will include 90 levels, but you’ll also be able to make your own maps and puzzles for others to try.The game, which was first announced in 2019, is coming to PS4, PS5, the original PSVR (yes!), PSVR 2, and PC. A... Continue reading…

Image: Rocksteady Games During Sony’s first State of Play of 2023, we were offered an extended look at Rocksteady’s first game in a handful of years — Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League.In Kill The Justice League, the titular doomed heroes are tasked with saving Metropolis from a Justice League corrupted by Brainiac. Despite the fact you won’t be playing as Batman, Kill The Justice League knows what players want, and that’s to swoop around a dark metropolis — one of the first scenes of gameplay is Harley Quinn grappling through the air. It looks like the villains you’ll get to play as (Harley Quinn, King Shark, Captain Boomerang, and Deadshot) will have their own unique flying mechanics, which looked pretty sick in the featurette.Kill The Justice League... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter Spaces, the company’s social audio rooms, no longer lets you use captions if you’re listening on iOS. Twitter still advertises that you can turn on captions through the three-dot menu in a Space, but on iOS, that option currently isn’t there.On other platforms, it seems like captions should work but don’t. When listening to a Space on the web, captions don’t show, and while the “CC” closed captions button is present, clicking it on or off doesn’t change anything. On Android, the option to turn on captions is there, but it didn’t work for one Verge staffer.The loss of captions in Spaces is a major blow to accessibility on the platform, as captions can be useful for those who are hard of hearing or who may want to follow a... Continue reading…

Eighty percent of the 40 most downloaded Android apps were found to have discrepancies between their actual privacy policies and the information listed on Google Play’s data safety section. | Photo: STR/NurPhoto via Getty Images An investigation into data safety labels on the Google Play Store has allegedly uncovered “serious loopholes” that allow apps like Twitter, TikTok, and Facebook to easily provide false or misleading information regarding how user data is shared. The study, conducted by the Mozilla Foundation, identified 40 of the most globally downloaded Android apps on the Google Play Store and discovered almost 80 percent had discrepancies between their privacy policies and the information listed on Google Play’s data safety section.Google launched its data privacy section for the Play Store last year, noting that developers had sole responsibility to provide “complete and accurate declarations” for the information collected by their apps by filling... Continue reading…

Automating your finances can make it more convenient to pay bills, save, and budget. | Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge Few things are more stressful than money. Between paying bills, buying necessities, investing for retirement, and saving up for a rainy day, personal finance can feel like a full-time job. But it doesn’t have to be. The best part about online banking is that everything can be automated — even if you’re living paycheck to paycheck.There are several benefits to automating your money. You’ll always pay your bills on time, which in turn eliminates late fees and protects your credit score. If you’re bad at saving money, you can automatically transfer a set amount per week or month to a savings or retirement account. Budgeting sound like a total nightmare? That can be automated, too.But while automating your finances can be convenient,... Continue reading…

Getty Images Federal prosecutors hit FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried with four new charges Thursday as part of their criminal case against the former crypto wunderkind.The new 12-count superseding indictment adds new bank fraud and money laundering counts against Bankman-Fried as well as modified campaign finance charges. In the new document, prosecutors describe how Bankman-Fried and two unnamed defendants conspired to defraud the Federal Elections Commission by using straw donors to “evade contribution limits on individual donations to candidates to whom” the former CEO had already donated.Bankman-Fried and his co-conspirators are alleged to have organized the straw donor scheme in a Signal group chat called “Donation Processing.” The chat is said... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Google has announced that the Magic Eraser feature, which tried to automatically remove unwanted parts of a picture and debuted with the Pixel 6, will no longer be exclusive to phones with its custom chips. Starting on Thursday, it’s going to be rolling out to Google One subscribers who use the Google Photos app on Android or iOS as well as “all Pixel users.”Magic Eraser, as well as the “Camouflage” function that lets you desaturate potentially distracting background objects rather than erasing them from a picture completely, will come with any level of Google One plan. If you have a Pixel, you won’t have to have a plan at all to get it.Google says it’s also adding editing features like an HDR effect for videos and exclusive collage... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google’s Workspace apps are getting a makeover. Google plans to refresh the design of Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides in the coming weeks to more closely align with its Material Design 3 design system, the company announced on Thursday.If you’re familiar with Gmail’s refreshed look, the new designs take a lot of cues from that. Google appears to be adding a few more darker hues to things like the toolbar and comments to make them stand out from the white page of a document. The “Share” button is also more rounded, a change from the rounded-corner rectangle Google currently uses for the button.You can get an idea of what the changes will look like in the image below of Google Docs. Image: Google You can get a look... Continue reading…

Image: Google When it comes to browsing entertainment, is there really a big difference between organizing content in different tabs or splitting it into totally separate pages? Google seems to think so. Today, the company is announcing some tweaks to the Google TV interface. “Movies” and “Shows” are being dropped from the main navigation bar at the top and will now be found beneath the row of your favorite streaming apps in the “For You” tab.In that spot, they’ll be joined by two new sections: Family and Español. Both are pretty self-explanatory. “With content ratings of PG or lower, it’s easy to find something the whole family can watch together,” Google says of the family page. (Kids will still be able to have their own profiles that are limited... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Podcasts are coming to YouTube Music. The streaming music service plans to add podcasts “in the near future,” YouTube’s head of podcasting, Kai Chuk, told Ariel Shapiro at Hot Pod Summit this morning. The addition will pit YouTube Music even more directly against Spotify, which has looked to podcasts — and big exclusives like Joe Rogan — as a way to retain users and grow its audience.“If someone wants to watch a podcast, we have a solution,” Chuk said. “If someone wants to listen to a podcast only, we should have a great experience for that as well.”“Our focus is on creators”YouTube Music will allow free ad-supported background listening to podcasts and offer “enhanced library tools,” Chuk said. There’ll also be a podcast badge to... Continue reading…

Samar Haddad / The Verge Many of us have more than one Google account, whether it’s for work, a side hustle, or simply a backup email address — and with modern browsers now keen to manage all of our logins for us, navigating sites such as Gmail and Google Docs with multiple accounts can get complicated.It needn’t be: Google actually has a straightforward switching mechanism built into its websites and web apps that works in any browser. In addition, the browsers themselves (and especially Chrome) have features for keeping different accounts separate so you always know which one you have open.Basic account switchingWhichever browser you use, you can manage multiple Google accounts inside it.

Illustration: The Verge Microsoft’s Bing AI chatbot history dates back at least six years, with Sydney first appearing in 2021. Continue reading…

Janelle Monáe in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. | Image: John Wilson / Netflix Later today, Netflix will be releasing a director’s commentary for Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery; subscribers will be able to check it out starting at 1PM ET. This isn’t the first time Netflix has released a commentary track, but the feature is something of a dying art, with DVD and Blu-ray releases largely supplanted by streaming, where special features are much less common.When the news was first announced, writer and director Rian Johnson, who signed on to direct a pair of Knives Out sequels for Netflix, wrote: “Sorry it took a minute but it’s a good one I think.” And given the sheer number of Easter eggs and cameos in the film — including an appearance from this very website — the commentary track will likely make it worth a... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube is going to let thousands more creators include multi-language audio tracks with their videos. The company was already testing the feature with a small number of creators, and beginning Thursday, many more will be able to include multi-language dubs with their videos to make them accessible to broader audiences.If you want to try this feature for yourself, check out this video on MrBeast’s YouTube channel. If you click on the gear icon, you’ll see an option for “audio track,” and if you click that, you’ll see the different language options available. Videos will also default to a user’s preferred language.In its early tests, YouTube says that, as of January, “we’ve already seen over 3,500 multi-language videos uploaded in... Continue reading…

The developer used information it had gathered about a prevelant third-party cheating software to catch and punish players using it red-handed. | Image: Valve Over 40,000 Dota 2 accounts have been permanently banned in the last few weeks after they were caught red-handed using third-party software to cheat the game. In a blog post published on Tuesday, Valve revealed that it had recently patched a known issue used by third-party software to cheat in Dota while simultaneously setting a honeypot trap to catch players using the exploit.According to Valve, the cheating software gave its users an unfair advantage by accessing information used internally by the Dota client that shouldn’t be visible during gameplay. After investigating how it worked, the developer then decided to identify and remove the “bad actors” from the active Dota playerbase.

Illustration by William Joel Plus more musical features come to Snapchat, and the Dynamic Island could come to an Android phone. Continue reading…